Abstract

The attempt to situate Yakṣa within the intellectual history of early India cannot proceed by external chronology alone. It must begin from the text of the Nirukta itself: the density of its vocabulary, the cosmological imagination it inherits, the linguistic register through which it speaks, and the astronomical phenomena it quietly internalises into ritual explanation. When these strands are drawn together, they converge on a narrow corridor of the sixth century BCE, a moment when Vedic ritualism had absorbed the introspective movement of the early Upaniṣads but had not yet encountered the analytic disciplines of Pāṇinian grammar or the doctrinal horizons of the śramaṇa movements. This interval — approximately 650 to 525 BCE, with the highest density of indicators near 560 BCE — forms the natural historical horizon of Yakṣa.